February 22, 2012 | PEN AmericanThe following is memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina. It appears in PEN America 15: Maps and was first published in One Day I Will Write About This Place (Graywolf Press, 2011).
Photo by wwarby via Flickr
An Island of Peace
It is a Sunday. I am nine. We are sitting on a patch of some tough nylon grass next to the veranda. Mum has brought out her Ugandan mats. I am reading a new book. I am reading a new book every day now. This book is about a flamingo woman; she is a secretary, her stick legs improbable in cloggy high heels, her handbag in her beak.
Flying away.
The flamingo came with a carton of books my mum bought from American missionary neighbors who were going back home. The sun is hot, I close my eyes. Red tongues and beasts flutter, aureoles of red and burning blue. If I turn back to my book, the letters jumble for a moment, then they disappear into my head, and word-made flamingos are talking and wearing high heels, and I can run barefoot across China, and no beast can suck me in, for I can run and jump farther than they can.
One of the things I first loved about Chinua Achebe, even before I read him, was his name. For someone with a name like mine, he feels like family. “He has an unusual name too,” I used to tell my high school friends as we read Things Fall Apart in class. “We’re practically brothers and sisters.” Now I say that about Barack Obama.
In today’s podcast, Edwidge Danticat reads from the first chapter of Things Fall Apart at the 2008 event A Tribute to Chinua Achebe.
February 20, 2012 | PEN AmericanIn PEN America 15: Maps, we asked writers to contemplate cartography and allow us to accompany them as they reencountered a world they’ve come to know through literature. Contributors were given a choice to write about a trip back into a fictional world that moved them or about the maps that had guided or misguided them as writers. Below is poet Billy Collins’s contribution.
In most fiction, the aim is to convey the reader to actual and imaginary places, often a mix of the two; and if such places are rendered vividly enough—readers often filling in the blanks to heighten the illusion—then the reader’s memory of a novel is closely linked to the contours of the novel’s places. Miss Lonelyhearts’s room, Bloom’s Phoenix Park, the cheap motels along the highways Humbert Humbert travels, Hemingway’s boat—scores of such places make up the maps of our reading.
But poets are exempt from the duties of social realism, including the credible rendering of place. If poems lead us anywhere beyond their own endings, they lead us into the consciousness of the poet, a map, you might say, of the poet’s intelligence, feeling, perception, intuition, and mannerisms.
When one poet reads another poet, it is like one explorer studying the maps of a predecessor. If the complete works of a poet are a world map of his own making, then to be influenced by another poet is to have the map of his writing placed over your own. Every time another strong influence is experienced, another map is placed on top of a growing pile of maps, which adds up to a weight of influence. And then, if the poet is lucky enough, he discovers his own way of writing, and at that point all the accumulated maps of his reading become transparencies, through which we look into the palimpsest of the new poet’s psyche. Voila!
February 20, 2012 | PEN AmericanContinuing our celebration of Black History Month, we are republishing this excerpt from Amiri Baraka’s short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone(Akashic Books, 2007). Baraka was the recipient of a 2008 PEN/Beyond Margins Award.
Tales of the Out & the Gone by Amiri Baraka
Conrad Loomis & the Clothes Ray
Loomis wasan old friend of mine. I kept in touch with him more or less regularly, but every few months he would vanish, so to speak. At first, I thought he would hide out when he hit the picket. He did do that a couple of times. He’d hit the number, get the cash, and then get away from everybody and spend it all. We used to tease him about this. And he hit a few times. But that’s because he’d spend so much money on that stuff. He might spend a hundred dollars a week trying to hit the picket. So when he did, he was still in the red, because he spent so much all the time.
Conrad was also a chemist—at least he was in college. But I thought he’d flunked out of chemistry. He said that didn’t stop him from learning the heavy stuff. He flunked the light stuff because it was boring. That sounded like an Esquire magazine article on Einstein, you know? So I just nodded, though I did think it was probably true, at least in Conrad’s head.
He had some chemistry-type jobs, paint factories, the mad Delaware Nazis who run DuPont. That kind of stuff. But eventually he would always get bounced for some reason. No, it wasn’t “some” reason. It was very specific. Conrad would always be trying to do his own thing during company time. You know that don’t get over. Neither did Conrad.
February 18, 2012 | Emma ConnollyPEN Picks highlights notable literary and advocacy events in New York City and around the country. From a reading on life in Antarctica to a David Foster Wallace retrospective, this week’s events promise to make you think.
February 17, 2012 | Deji OlukotunA weekly roundup of PEN-related news from around the web.
Mark Twain, 1907. Photo via steamboattimes.com
PEN launched the Reckoning with Torture project in conjunction with the ACLU. Spearheaded by Doug Liman, director of The Bourne Identity, the project invites people to participate in coming to terms with America’s torture program after 9/11.
Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year-old writer from Jeddah, tweeted a series of messages addressed to the Prophet Mohammed on the anniversary of the Prophet’s birth, some of which conveyed questions about his faith. Twitter registered more than thirty thousand responses to his tweets, many of which accused him of blasphemy and called for his death. Kashgari fled to Malaysia before he was extradited to Saudi Arabia, where he may face the death sentence.
PEN President, novelist, and scholar Anthony Appiah received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in Washington, D.C. for “seeking eternal truths in the contemporary world.”
PEN America 15: Maps, due out soon, explores how writers encounter and examine the fictional topographies of their lives.
Once a week, the PEN Poetry Series publishes new work by emerging and established writers from coast to coast. Subscribe to the Poetry Series mailing list and have poems delivered to your e-mail as soon as they are published (no spam, no news, just poems). We hope you like the pieces we find as much as we do, and pass them on.
This installment features new poetry by Jenny Sampirisi from her collection Croak (Coach House Books, 2011).
CROAK
Frogirls:
Dear lovely legs dear love my legs in this better pond we are coming together my fingers in our genitals in a swamp we’re coming together your hands with fingers splintering in our genitals in this pond with chemicals so close to a way in a way in a way to weather the holes tic tic tic oh that’s such a cliché together is so hermaphroditic tic tic tic but this is the frog frog female female all that mal in us in our best pond are you singing now can we find each other over a ruckus of planes a dread taint through this swamp who are you to come traipsing through our fucking our lovely love we’ve birthed without you and now you build a home here with soil coo-roak coo-roak coo-roak we’re trying to understand this “you” we’ve made out of the hairs that fall in the bathtub or stick to the toilet seat we tic tic tic when you flush when you push yourself down the drain your factual waste your evolutionary boundaries.
Celebrate the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Ford’s birthday with his discussion of character, craft, and the writing process with Vientamese-Australian author Nam Le. This transcript was adapted from a public conversation held at the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. You can listen to the complete event below and read an extended version of this transcript in PEN America 11: Make Believe.
RICHARD FORD: Henry James said that “the terrible whole of art is free selection.” And that’s one of the thrilling things about your work, for me, just seeing where you find a story, which is always where I don’t expect you to find it. You trained as a lawyer; I went to law school myself. Do you think legal training encourages habits of mind that writing fiction draws upon or exploits in any way?
NAM LE: I guess there’s a certain precision that law encourages—though that precision is not necessarily used for the articulation of anything specific. Quite often the law encourages precise obfuscation—leaving a subject open enough so that no one quite knows what you mean, or pretending you know what you mean when, in fact, you don’t, or leaving things in a state of vagueness that doesn’t appear vague. And that’s been quite interesting to import, at times.
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